Academy Awards 2013: Best-picture field to test the spirit of truth

By Bill GoodykoontzGannett Chief Film Critic

Published: Monday, February 18, 2013 at 12:17 p.m.

Last Modified: Monday, February 18, 2013 at 12:17 p.m.

“It’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.”

So says Chief in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Listening to some wags go on during the Academy Awards season, you might think Chief was talking about this year’s best-picture nominees, not the inner-workings of a nightmarish psychiatric hospital.

An unusually large number of the best-picture nominees this year are fact-based tales; others deal with real-life issues we sometimes don’t want to think about or that you’d think people wouldn’t want to shell out money to watch.

This has led to controversy, of course, with some people hewing a little too close to the “historical” aspects of historical fiction and the role of movies in society in their complaint. Yes, it’s only a movie, but on the other hand there is a little more to it than that. It’s all certainly made for an interesting run-up to the awards ceremony. And, it should be noted, the discussion involves a crop of really good movies.

“Good historical fiction uses the past to open doors, rather than close them,” says James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. “It helps people to realize that the past matters, and stimulates viewers to learn more rather than to assume they now have all the answers.”

Among the best-picture nominees, there has been plenty of stimulation. “Argo” is a treatment of a real-life incident involving the Iran hostage crisis. “Zero Dark Thirty” looks at the hunt for Osama bin Laden and, more controversially, the value of torture in that hunt. “Lincoln” is more a history lesson about passage of the 13th Amendment than it is a film about the 16th president. “Django Unchained,” for all the usual Quentin Tarantino pop-culture references, also offers a graphic, unflinching look at the horrors of slavery. “Amour” and “Silver Linings Playbook” portray the difficulties of aging and mental illness, respectively.

It’s like a combination of high-school civics and the down side of growing up. But each film is ultimately satisfying. That’s due in part to the execution, of course; each is brilliantly directed and acted. Yet it also has something to do with the movies being about something. It’s true that serious dramas always do better than comedies come Oscar time, but this is a bumper crop in terms of history and real life on the march.

“It’s refreshing to see mainstream film directors acquiring an appetite for cinema that forces us to face our issues head on,” says Ya’ke Smith, an assistant professor of film at the University of Texas at Arlington and a filmmaker whose work includes “Wolf,” about sexual abuse and the clergy. “All of these films are an attempt by the artist to work out his or her personal attitudes or feelings toward these issues, thus delving into the emotional core of the collective human spirit.

“All in all, we connect because the artist has infused these works with common human emotions and flaws that we all are in some ways trying to work through.”

Films for the thinking person

Why now, though? In truth, thanks to the byzantine nature of how films are released, we cannot overlook coincidence. But there are other reasons at work, too.

“The recent emphasis on truth-telling, or actuality, in film is most likely a response to a couple of cultural factors, from an election process that seemed to highlight a severe lack of truth/accuracy, increased appetite for reality shows and their aesthetics, to four years of a down economy (which actually resulted in a rash of fantasy films and TV series) where we dove into escapist movies,” Derek Burrill, an associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, says in an e-mail. “Audiences might actually be swinging in the opposite direction.”

Of the films based on actual events, “Argo” has come in for some grief for ginning up the ending to make it more exciting than it really was. But that complaint has paled in comparison to the uproar over the depiction of the importance of torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” and, late in the game, playing fast and loose with historical facts in “Lincoln.”

In “Argo,” six of Americans escape the U.S. Embassy in Tehran just as it is being overrun by Iranian protesters. The six spend months hiding in the home of the Canadian ambassador, until that proves untenable. So a CIA operative dreams up an improbable rescue plan: fly into Iran, pretend the group was scouting locations for a feature film, get out. That happened, but evidently those involved were able to leave without much incident, as opposed to the chest-tightening drama depicted in the film.

The debate over “Zero Dark Thirty” is more heated and complex. The CIA tortures prisoners in the film, something that the U.S. government has acknowledged doing. The question is whether this treatment led to credible leads. The Obama administration argues that it never did. The film does not make a clear case either way. Obviously we “get” bin Laden, but the movie makes the case that this was because of an incredible amount of scut work on the part of one operative (though torture is not discounted). Sadly, the fight has distracted some people from what is a powerful, important film.

Earlier this month “Lincoln” came under fire from Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., who wrote director Steven Spielberg to complain that the film depicts two of three representatives voting against the 13th Amendment, while in fact all the state’s representatives voted for it. And Courtney is correct. In his letter, Courtney says that in a movie based on real-life events “accuracy is paramount.”

And that’s where Courtney is wrong.

There is no mandate in any movie that events be depicted exactly as they occur. In any work of art, the spirit of truth is far more important than the literal truth.

“These films are not documentaries, they are not works of history,” Grossman says. “Good historical fiction does not offer a set of facts so much as it uses the past to stimulate historical thinking, and to offer insights into almost any aspect of public culture. These films are not nextbooks; they are not encyclopedias.

“They are narratives that effectively draw on the past and on popular interest in the past to deepen that interest and to provoke critical thinking about they issues that they raise.”

Handling the truth

In his response to Courtney’s letter, given to the New York Times, “Lincoln” screenwriter Tony Kushner gets to the heart of things, not just over the debate of his movie, but the role literal truth plays in all movies.

“In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what ‘Lincoln’ is,” he says. “I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters.”

No, not shocked at all. The shocking thing would be if Kushner or any other writer or director did it differently.

“Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama. ...

“None of the key moments of that story — the overarching story our film tells — are altered. Beyond that, if the distinction between history and historical fiction doesn’t matter, I don’t understand why anyone bothers with historical fiction at all.”

Happily, people like Kushner, Spielberg and the people who made so many of the other best-picture nominees this year do. Truth, fiction or, more properly something in-between, they enrich their audiences even more than they educate them.

Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic is the chief film critic for Gannett. Read his blog at goodyblog.azcentral.com. For movie stories, trailers and more go tomovies.azcentral.com. Twitter: goodyk.

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